“Unlike Prince Charles, though, Gen X’ers don’t plan to stick around and hope for the crown. A recent survey from the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI) shows that 37% have “one foot out the door” and are looking to leave their current employers within the next three years.

With promotions only a scant possibility, what can employers do to keep their talent engaged and on board? Here are five options:”

Develop corporate chameleons. “Once I’ve learned my job, I like to move on,” says one X’er interviewed for the CTI report. “I need something new to keep things fresh.” To prevent X’ers from feeling stalled and browning out, companies are rotating promising employees through different functions on a regular schedule

Let them learn. “I really like my company. It’s a great fit,” says another X’er. “But having said that, if it’s the right thing, I’d jump. I won’t stop learning or growing just to have a job.

Bring them out of the shadows. Mentoring and sponsorship programs serve another purpose: They match mid-level managers with senior-level executives who can provide opportunities to enrich their career experience.

Test their wings. Many X’ers would agree with one of their cohort who declares, “I have an entrepreneurial spirit that won’t shut up.” With many having been brought up as latchkey kids, Gen X is highly self-reliant; today, 70% of X’ers surveyed by CTI prefer to work independently, and 34% aspire to be an entrepreneur.

Promote partnerships. It’s easy for X’ers to demonize Boomer managers as intransigent dinosaurs and Gen Y subordinates as self-aggrandizing upstarts. Break down the barriers through intergenerational partnerships and teams.

To understand the challenges of using collaborative or social software inside business organizations, begin by thinking about the use of similar technologies in your personal life. When we use Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and most other personal social software applications, we share these experiences:

To understand the challenges of using collaborative or social software inside business organizations, begin by thinking about the use of similar technologies in your personal life. When we use Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and most other personal social software applications, we share these experiences:

Often we’re instructed to use it by someone in authority, rather than invited by friends.

Little of what we actually get paid to do (or believe we get paid to do) requires information or input from the vast majority of other people on the network.

Participation feels like dropping pearls into a black hole — there’s often no sense of getting something in return for sharing an idea or suggestion.

We have no control over who sees our information and little idea what “they” are doing with it.

The site is unattractive and requires a manual to get started.

The software is generic and requires a work-around to do the specific things we would really like to do.

“However, tactical experiments generally result in outcomes that aren’t strategic by definition, with limited outcomes and blunted impact; there are much better ways to apply social business when the underlying business processes — and even the underlying business models — are thoroughly overhauled more holistically for a pervasively connected and digital world.

To underscore this point, an important new post by Altimeter’s Jeremiah Owyang this week explores how we’re only getting started with social business, even as the whole social and 2.0 movement gets ready to reach its first full decade. In the post, Jeremiah presents some of their latest survey data showing that only a few organizations have reached an advanced stage of adoption, that there is limited integration across business units, products lines, and customer databases, and that only a leading cadre of companies are highly organized or systematic in their use of social media. In other words, a lot of useful work has been done but most of us are only getting started and we know it.

Unfortunately, I see companies all too often squandering even the the low hanging, easy-to-reach potential to re-conceive and galvanize key processes in customer care, product development, marketing, sales, and operations. Usually it’s because they look at it through the lens of what they do today, versus what the industry norm will be in five years, or even what leading companies are already doing today.

Level of organization for social business. This is a measure of how systematic, strategic, and intrinsic social business has become with the people, processes, and policies currently in place within the business. The progressive scale that is most often cited, and which I largely agree is the following:

Extent of social business adoption. When it comes to organizing for social business, there are a number of phases that organizations go through. This includes tactical experiments, departmental adoption, grassroots efforts, and so on that ultimately lead to social media committees, enterprise-wide strategy efforts, business process re-engineering, governance programs, education and communication efforts, and so on. Mature organizations have a well-defined social business program

Social engagement level of workers: Internally, externally, and cross-border. Are social business processes well defined? Does everyone know their role in them? More importantly, when they are drawn in, do they participate effectively?

Measures of effectiveness. This is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to business value and making sense of return on investment (ROI). Even today, a large percentage of social business efforts don’t measure the results other than some high-level operating KPIs (key performance indicators.) Some of the reason for this is that it was very difficult until recently to measure the results, particularly if it had to be done frequently, which is typically the case with the fast moving conversations, trends, and opportunities of social business

Progress along the digital business ladder. In its more transformative and strategic form, social business alters and then recasts the very business models of an organization, including how its products and services are produced, delivered, and supported.

“And we received a flood of big ideas and game-changing initiatives and experiments from management innovators in all kinds of organizations around the world. Last month, we had the tough job of narrowing the pool down to fourteen excellent finalists, Bow we’re proud to introduce you to the seven winners:”

Bogsnes and his team focused on two powerful levers: abolishing the traditional budget in favor of a more dynamic and distributed process, and scrapping the annual calendar for a more continuous and variable approach to setting time-horizons for a particular business or project

creation of cross-company virtual collaborative communities based on shared passion (whether around a specific technology or a particular role or even a business process). More than an “internal social network,” EA’s communities approach is a clever design, including a “light governance” model and guidelines for integrating community activities into “regular” operations.

Vodafone UK has taken the technology mantra of “eating your own dogfood” to the extreme with an open, “weightless” workplace, with no offices or assigned desks, no tethered phones or computers, a rich variety of purpose-built meeting spaces, one file drawer per person, a tough “clean desk” policy (any documents or belongings left on a desk overnight will be disappeared), and lots of coffee. The results were immediate and dramatic: from a dramatic reduction in meetings, paper, flights, the speed of decision-making, and sales cycle times to increased revenue growth, collaborative problem-solving, and tours of Vodafone headquarters.

TMN launched a “work style reform” initiative which has grown progressively more autonomous, transparent, and Web-enabled. Today, employees define their own roles and responsibilities, choose where and when to work, launch “Next Dream” projects to promote a strategic priority, and use social technology to bid out problems internally and connect with the wider communit

Why should we spend our most energetic years striving and achieving and leave our true passions to our creaky “golden” years? No reason at all, says Semler, who offers up a clever design for employees to “buy back” one day of the week to spend on “retirement” pursuits, and the opportunity to trade in those retirement hours for meaningful work in their later years.

“I’ve spent much of my life studying — both as an academic and as a consultant — how companies use incentives. The vast majority of companies mess this issue up, resulting in confusion, frustration, and often, the opposite of what they intended. There are four ways that companies get incentives horribly wrong:”

“In November 2010, to big fanfare at Unilever’s London headquarters, chief executive Paul Polman boldly articulated a new strategy. The company would double the size of its business, he said, by channeling its efforts toward achieving eight ambitious goals by 2020 — among them, doubling the proportion of Unilever’s portfolio that meets the highest nutritional standards, and halving the water associated with the consumer use of its products.

To most of us, this did not sound like typical corporate strategy, but Polman’s reframing of what it means to succeed in business is not an isolated example. It is indicative of a new generation of leadership emerging at the top of many of the world’s largest organizations.”

It recognizes this new reality will spell decline for some commercial activities, but growth for others who find better ways of operating.

Across the board we see the top executives of some of the world’s largest organizations talking about, taking action on, and defining their success in terms of things that have conventionally been the realm of political leaders and NGO activists. The change has not gone unremarked by management’s leading thinkers. Witness Chris Lazslo’s work on sustainable value, and Michael Porter’s theorizing about shared value.

. The new generation of business leaders, they emphasized, must be able to engage meaningfully with multiple constituencies and relate well with all kinds of different actors in society.

understand the business risks and opportunities of environmental and social trends — and how their sector and other stakeholders (regulators, customers, suppliers, investors, NGOs) are responding to them (82%)

align social and environmental objectives with financial goals (81%)

integrate social and environmental trends into strategic decision-making (70%)

identify key stakeholders that have an influence on the organization (73%)

understand how the organization has impact on these stakeholders, both positively and negatively (74%)

We’ve all heard the adage that without CEO and executive level support for innovation, it won’t go very far. That is certainly true, but it requires much more than just lip service – ideally, innovation should be somewhere on the CEO’s performance scorecard.

2. Make it Easy to Innovate

If employees are required to innovate only at certain times or in certain places within the enterprise, then innovation will be stifled. The business must provide easily accessible tools, preferably web-based allowing universal access, for employees to submit and develop innovative ideas.

3. Encourage Collaboration

A study by two Princeton economists confirmed that two heads are indeed better than one. When it comes to innovation, especially disruptive innovation that is breaking new ground, the power of multiple minds creatively working together far exceeds the ability of a single individual to envision the end result.

4. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Most enterprises today are doing more with less. Employees are stretched thinner and thinner as businesses try to maintain the status quo or even grow slightly without increasing expenses. Because of this, innovation often takes a back seat in the employee’s mind. But with thoughtful, directed communications to the employee base, innovation can remain at the forefront of each employee’s priority list. Creative

5. Reward with More than Just Dollars

It is true that many innovators are “coin-operated,” in that that they respond favorably to monetary rewards. So your innovation program should include cash or merchandise rewards that will speak to those employees. However, don’t overlook the employees who are motivated more by recognition among their peers.

“”This business model is right for a company selling Purina Dog Chow, circa 1970.”

“There’s no way we could ever be this collaborative.”

Both are comments I got about my book, back in 2009, about setting direction, collaboratively. The first is from a Google executive; the second, from an exec at Cisco. Same business model architecture, two entirely different responses: obvious or unachievable.”

I have used the term social era. It’s not to create more jargon, it’s to emphasize a point: that social is more than the stuff the marketing team deals with. It’s something that allows organizations to do things entirely differently — if we let it become the backbone of our business models.

How many companies have figured out how to shift from supply chain management to integrating customer feedback directly into their product design, distribution, and delivery? Because that’s the point.

Sharing, not telling. When companies think of social media, they hope to get consumers to “like” them or “fan” them, as if that increased connection is meaningful. Again, that captures the marketing aspect but misses the strategic point. The social object that unites people isn’t a company or a product; the social object that most unites people is a shared value or purpose.

Collaborating with people through shared purpose creates advantage because it allows everyone to work towards a shared goal

It allows us to “tear down that wall” between who is “in” or “outside” the firm creating a more permeable organization which unleashes the inherently collaborative nature of work

the web and the social era enabled by it have illustrated a new truth: it’s not enough to do more, faster, cheaper. No, we need to do things entirely differently.

hus far, organizations have been focused on tacking on social elements onto their current operations. Social has been adopted programmatically, rather than strategically. All that does is get the Gorillasaurs to lumber a little faster. It’s not enough to escape the asteroid.

The world has changed; how we create value has changed. Organizationally we have not. It will be wholly insufficient to put the word “social” in front of existing business models and expect things to change. Instead, we need to imagine the fundamental enterprise anew for the social era. Lean, adaptive, community-driven organizations, built for speed, will thrive.

” Effective organizational collaboration comes about when workers regularly narrate their work within a structure that encourages transparency and shares power & decision-making. I have also learned that changing work routines can be a messy process that requires significant time, much of it dedicated to modelling behaviours. “

as for the new social and collaboration skills that workers require, well you simply can’t train people to be social! What was required was getting down and dirty and helping people understand what it actually meant to work collaboratively in the new social workplace, and the value that this would bring to them.“

The low visibility activities link directly to personal knowledge management (PKM) skills, based on the process of Seeking information & knowledge; making Sense of it; and Sharing higher value information with others.

It is a difficult path to get acceptance that each worker is responsible for his or her own learning and additionally must be a contributing member of a network. PKM is individuals retaking control of learning, and making it transparent. It takes time, but it also requires a receptive environment.

My experience is that changing to more collaborative, networked ways of work requires coordinated change activities from both the top and the bottom. It has to be a two-pronged approach and it will take some time and effort.

” Over the last year I’ve been speaking with many corporate business and HR leaders and have heard a common theme: we need our organizations to be more agile. We need to redesign the organization so we can learn faster, communicate better, and respond more rapidly to change. This quest for the agile organization has changed the nature of what we call a job. “

Well the world has changed. Today, thanks to communications technology, people can do their “jobs” everywhere and anywhere. We collaborate across the globe just as easily as we can in the same room. People don’t necessarily progress “upward,” but often “sideways” or “deeper” in expertise.

Your value as an employee is no longer “I am good at my job” but “how much demand is there for my skills.”

Many of the HR executives I talk with tell me they’re having an increasingly difficult time recruiting. As our research points out, this is not because there aren’t people looking for jobs, it’s because their organization needs specialized roles and the workforce itself has not fully adjusted to this new world.

1. They reward results and expertise, not position.

2. They break down functional silos and facilitate work across business functions.

3. They reward continuous learning and “learning agility.”

4. They hire for values, innate skills, and fit, not for experience.

5. They encourage and promote horizontal mobility.

If you are a manager or business executive, think hard about your own organization. Have you created enough flexibility in the organization to empower people to develop expertise and bring it to your customers

HR Executives and Managers:

Are you promoting HR practices which create cross-organizational work and expertise? Is your reward system flexible and open enough to enable people to work on project teams which cross the organization? Is your performance management process agile and flexible and does it force continuous feedback and transparency? Do you hire for skills and capabilities or just experience? Do you promote and facilitate talent mobility? Do you regularly communicate company values, goals, and strategies to encourage people to think of the organization as “one team” and not a set of functional silos?

“…the shareholder capitalism model has long been promoted by mainstream economists based on the simplistic assumption that human motivation can be boiled down to the rational pursuit of self-interest… ”the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.” Capitalist enterprises must focus single-mindedly on increasing “shareholder value.”

However, there is another model, called “stakeholder capitalism,” that is better aligned with what we have learned about human nature…”

“…I believe that the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies. From an investor’s perspective, the purpose of a business is to maximize profits. But that’s not the purpose for other stakeholders – for customers, employees, suppliers, and the community.

At Whole Foods, we measure our success by how much value we create for all six of our important stakeholders…It is the function of the company leadership to develop solutions that continually work for the common good…The shareholders of a public company own their stock voluntarily. If they don’t agree with the philosophy of the business, they can always sell their investment…”

“The real trend this year is not the technology. It’s about helping business people make better decisions, and actually change the way companies do business. Analytics has always been about transforming business, but the recent huge changes in analytic technology have created interesting new opportunities for business innovation.”

And on the front end, various technologies are coming together to provide unprecedented levels of context-based “actionable insights”, including self-service data discovery, advanced visualization including maps, mobile analytics, predictive analytics, collaborative decision-support. They help provide more action-oriented interfaces optimized for the context of the users, both inside and outside the organization.

University researchers have pointed out that today’s management techniques are based on the limitations of information scarcity:

with access to the finest granularities of information, management will be able to move freely from macro to micro levels and will be able to measure, plan and act accordingly. With increased resolution come more options to drill down, eliminate inefficiencies and cut costs

New forms of data: ‘unstructured’ data such as text has long been difficult to effectively analyze and incorporate into mainstream corporate analytics. The new systems make it much easier for companies like Medtronic to access and analyze the large amount of complaints and feedback data they receive about their products, combine it with other data sources, and provide it to business users with dynamic interfaces:

Social media is too often a marginal activity that people are happy to leave up to a dedicated team elsewhere in the organization, rather than embedded in everything we do. This post looks in particular at how social media techniques can be applied to the process of product creation.”

Social Research. It’s now easy to find data about new opportunities, such as customers complaining about business problems or competitor products. And it’s easy to get customer feedback on problems with our own products.

Ideation. One of the most painful parts of any product creation process is prioritization – we can never make a “perfect” product. There will always be some compromise in terms of functionality or cost. New ideation platforms, such as SAP’s Idea Place offer an opportunity to ask customers and potential customers to give their feedback directly on possible new features and what compromises to make.

But using social media, it’s now much easier to create fast prototypes (mockups, concept version, wireframes, etc.), and then make them available to customers for testing and feedback.

We can integrate social media into products to improve their usefulness or effectiveness.

Since the 1950s, technologists have adopted new approaches that allow them to better address complexity and ongoing change. One, called agile development, is a different way of doing work. The other, called service orientation, is more focused on how bits of work are connected to other bits. Both of these approaches emphasize continuous learning, adaptation, and distributed control, rather than planning, prediction and central control. They are specifically designed for managing work in fast-changing, complex, uncertain environments.

Agile is about small teams that deliver real, working software at all times, get meaningful feedback from users as early as possible, and improve the product over time in iterative development cycles.

Object orientation allowed programmers to design software as a system of interacting objects instead of a list of instructions.

The next phase in programming’s evolution, service orientation, emerged to solve this problem. It delivered a way for software objects to interconnect with each other over the internet, at a massive scale.

Software services are very similar to software objects. They are modular functional units that can operate independently and interact with other services using an agreed-upon set of common standards. The big move forward comes from the way that they interact with the larger world

The power of a service-oriented architecture is that each service can learn, adapt and coevolve without wreaking havoc on the overall system, just like species coevolve in a biological community.

Service contracts.

A service contract is a simple description of the service, including what the service provider needs from customers, what it will do for them, and any rules about how the service provider and customer will interact. Like any business contract, it represents an agreement.

A service contract specifies what the provider will do, but it doesn’t specify how the work will be done.

This is important because it allows the service to independently evolve and improve its operations without affecting customers or other services. A service can be as complex as it likes internally, so long as it provides a simple contract describing what it does and how it will interact with its customers.

The reason to hide complexity is that it makes a service easier to understand and use. Since customers see only the things they can act on, make decisions about or buy, they can make better, faster choices.

Composability.

Most services are combinations of other services.

Loose coupling.

Loose coupling simply means that services agree to use a set of common set of rules about how to connect. So as long as a service follows the rules, it can update, change or modify itself without having to worry about the impact on other services in the system.

But there can be good reasons for tight coupling. Things that are designed to work closely together can deliver better performance, more efficiently.

Agile and service-oriented approaches are designed for complex, uncertain, fast-changing environments. They are proven methods for organizing systems and work. And the same approaches that solved complex software problems can also work in business.

Most businesses today are not designed with agility in mind. Their systems are tightly coupled, because their growth has been driven by a desire for efficiency rather than flexibility.

Many business systems are tightly coupled, like trains on a track, in order to maximize control and efficiency. But what the business environment requires today is not efficiency but flexibility

So we sit in these business meetings, setting goals and making our strategic plans, arguing about which way the rails should be pointing, when what we really need is to get off the train altogether and embrace a completely different system and approach.

» If our people have a new idea…

“In my recent visit, I asked some of these questions and received the following response. “If our people have a new idea, we have a process for them to submit it.” This one statement told me quite a lot about this person’s perspective if not the perspective of the company.”

First, “IF our people have a new idea”… If? really? It should have been “when”. People are creative beings. If I respect that, I will expect them to have ideas…not be surprised when they do.

Second, “we have a PROCESS”. If you want to take the wind out of the sails of a creative person, just introduce a “process”. Processes aren’t bad, but they infer a ‘one size fits all’ approach to any action. They make the idea become part of a transaction.

Which brings me to “for them to SUBMIT it”. Just drop your idea into the process and then wait to see what happens. You submit payments…you submit actions to workflows…you don’t submit ideas. You share ideas.

“If we have learned anything during the past few years it is that the pace of change is absolutely ridiculous. No matter what part of the organization you are in, your ability to keep pace is challenged daily. If we can accept this as a truth, then there is uniquely one best practice that might stand a chance, how we adapt to change. Other than that, all other ‘Best Practices’ are simply roadblocks to success and excuses to remain irrelevant. “

“Best Practice is a forensic science, an autopsy on a corpse. Learning is an activity of the living.

they are stories, there for you to pick out the pieces which make sense to you, your team and your organization. Don’t assume someone else knows best. Has anyone really been doing what you have longer than you have been doing it? Sure, some parts, of course. But all of it?

what struck me is that companies looking to implement Social Customer Service had no practices from which to draw. They listened to their customers, internal teams and understood the vision of their own organization.

“So it behooves smart executives to avoid the pitfalls uniquely inherent in social initiatives. Here are eight missteps that can sink more than your social initiative. While these points relate primarily to internal, employee-facing social initiatives, many of them are equally relevant to customer-facing initiatives as well. “

No interest from key users: Analysts estimate that approximately a third of workers will download and share new technology, with or without corporate approval

Too many tools: Technology silos are a reality, but you need a road map for creating a single collaboration platform.

Unclear business objectives: Technology-driven projects are a sure recipe for failure.

Not paying attention to key stakeholders: If your project manager is a bulldozer type who tells key stakeholders that he “knows better” because he has already done five such projects, you’re headed for trouble, big time.

IT and the business are at loggerheads: With the advent of SaaS (software as a service) solutions, business units now have viable alternatives to central IT. Smart IT organizations realize they have to support the business to make initiatives, such as social business work

No culture of technology grassroots adoption: Collaboration and social initiatives must have eager champions at the business-user level. A top-down approach to a social initiative makes it difficult to pump up worker’s interest in being part of the project.

Project is not aligned with other business initiatives: A social initiative without business goals will die on the vine

Taking the wrong approach: Introducing “rip and replace” technology that ignores daily work habits is probably the biggest failure factor in the list.

“The most successful innovators are consistently portrayed as possessing a passion that borders on dogmatism. They work tirelessly to bend reality to achieve their vision, with Steve Jobs and his “reality distortion field” serving as the prototypical example.

There’s no doubt that passion is a critical component of innovation. After all, innovation is awfully hard work, with plenty of false starts. Rosabeth Moss Kanter teaches that everything can look like a failure in the middle. Mike Tyson puts it another way: “Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.” Passion is necessary to keep pushing when the punch inevitably lands.”

“We recently convened a team of 21 millennials from various GE businesses and functions around the world for a special three-month assignment: identify ways to attract, develop, and retain talent in the future. We named the effort “Global New Directions,” and we knew we’d picked the right people almost immediately when they told us that they didn’t want to retain employees, they wanted to inspire them.”

Leveraging gaming technology to create a new channel that connects the world to GE in a fun and engaging way, helping to educate prospective employees about the company and its economic and social values.

Enhancing our performance-management system with new tools to help employees navigate their career at GE and identify a wider range of opportunities across the company. Processes that allow for more just-in-time feedback and coaching, which the next generation considers to be highly desirable, round out the enhancements.

Moreover, business leaders agree that great innovations in the 21st century will be distinguished by shared value — addressing both human needs and the bottom line — versus delivering profit alone.

Tomorrow’s global leaders possess an exemplary external focus — they collaborate not only with customers but with a wide range of stakeholders including governments, regulators, NGOs, and community groups.

Leaders are adaptive and agile, clear thinkers who are not only decisive but able to connect strategy to purpose in a way that fosters commitment.

Leaders possess both the imagination to innovate and the courage to implement — they’re willing to take risks to champion ideas.

“To deliver more value, the human resources function needs to spend more time accelerating operational improvement and less time on its traditional administrative and compliance activities. As Randy MacDonald, senior vice president of HR at IBM, told me, “It’s important for HR to decide what is core and non-core. Administrative responsibilities such as getting paychecks out on time are not core. In HR, we need to focus on what is important.””

To get the “people” part of process improvement right, HR needs employees who can go toe-to-toe discussing operational changes with line managers. HR professionals need credibility to challenge line managers on whether they are improving the attitudes and skills of their people at the same time they’re redesigning their jobs.

Managers of HR administrative services such as payroll and benefits need to focus on running a consistent, reliable operation at low cost. To do this, they need standard, simple, automated procedures.

In response to my post on why HR doesn’t typically lead change, many people suggested separating the compliance, transactional, and administrative roles of HR (e.g., in a group called “Personnel”) from the more strategic improvement responsibilities (e.g., in a group called “Talent Development and Performance/Innovation/Productivity Improvement”)

Unlike the “Personnel” people who run a tight operation, these “Organizational Development” people should be change agents with a bias for operational innovation

Of course, like other corporate functions, HR needs to continue to do a good job at core administrative functions, and line managers won’t accept offers of more value-added services if those basics aren’t covered

But HR will continue to miss opportunities to deliver value if its leaders won’t take some risks and drive the people side of operational change.

“Great service is always a differentiator, even more so when people are hurting. The service companies that thrived coming out of the Great Depression — think Macy’s and Disney — figured out how to take care of their customers in a climate of fear and uncertainty. The fog of recession may be starting to lift, but most households and businesses are still feeling vulnerable today. History makes a compelling case that serving customers with integrity — delivering steadfast, predictable service quality — can translate into outsized loyalty and market share when the economy commits to a comeback. “

Underperform. It turns out winning service companies aren’t great at everything. They’re bad at some things, often very bad, but the pattern isn’t random. It’s tightly mapped to the priorities of their customers. Service leaders tend to over-deliver on the features their customers value most and under-deliver on the features their customers value least.

Streamline the back office. One way Zappos funds its legendary service is by relying on a very lean operation. Back-end cost savings get invested in front-end excellence, which means that shipping’s free and a kind, competent Zappos employee has the cultural freedom to stay on the phone with you as long as you want

Simplify your employees’ jobs, and your service levels will improve. Figure out how to go from eight screens to four screens, and put away the timer.

Put your customers to work. Self-service is on the rise in almost every service industry we’ve studied. The reason is clear — asking customers to pump their own gas, bus their own tables, or perform any other task your employees once did can indeed save you money. But the trick, once again, is to design self-service in a way that actually improves the experience

“It has been said many times, that for social business to succeed to create the evolution towards Enterprise 2.0, we need to put this social activity directly into the flow of how people work. In that light, we spent quite some time at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris, discussing how to integrate social business activity into enterprise processes, and in particular from the view of process modeling.”

suggested the model in Figure 1 that illustrates social activity as something that occurs outside the process, where each process step may have an associated space for social interaction activity. My interpretation is that in this model, the social activity occurs outside the process step as an ancillary activity that the process step itself is unchanged but there is a documented link to the activity elsewhere.

In this case, the process step itself is entirely replaced from the traditional approach to the task being carried out inside a social activity. The result from the social activity task is then placed back into expected output points of the enterprise process. As Figure 2 suggests it may replace one, two or more process steps at a time, with the results being posted in the expected output points.

A third approach that I have seen was to go the next step and rather than keep a separate social activity space, to actually embed that space inside the process.

The change here, as shown in Figure 3, is to allow not just the embedding of the space, but essentially have that space exists in both the process step, as well as the enterprise social layer. The difference here makes it possible for an enterprise user to refer to or incorporate other social objects in the enterprise social environment, such as related files, videos, other discussions, into this space.

here is a fourth possibility (see Figure 4) which I described in an earlier article about embedding the workflow of the process directly within the social activity in the example from Podio. Here the enterprise social environment is the space in which the processes exist entirely. The difficulty with this model is in that the enterprise process needs to be developed or grown from scratch within the social environment.

In the third model, the enterprise process exists as is and people have to go to it to perform these tasks. It

In the fourth model, the process appears in their stream of activities as individual process steps

In the long run, the transition to integrate social business activity with enterprise processes will be one of migration, perhaps slowly. This means having transitional models like the first and second where they do not interfere with the enterprise process as it is. The more evolved models shown in the third and fourth scenarios are where we need to be.

““Can business processes and social media co-exist?” – This was one of the first big questions on day 2 of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit asked by Bertrand Duperrin from Nextmodernity and that question lead to a very interesting discussion of the role of social tools in the world of Business Process Management (BPM) – something that links nicely back to the theme from day 1 of harnessing the conversations taking place in the organization. Traditional BPM lack a proper feedback loop to ensure proper organizational learning, but if you intelligently integrate social tools, this gap may be filled.”

If you just add a social layer inside the processes, you may find yourself creating ‘social silos’ effectively working against the purpose you are trying to accomplish

If we are to succeed with more ‘social’ business processes, we simply MUST get out there and involve people – all people.

Alexander Richter from CSCM presented some very interesting thoughts on this topic arguing that we obviously need to measure the outcomes of social business initiatives, but you have to take many things, eg. organizational maturity, into consideration when setting your success criteria

but if we the starting point is that every company is unique, why would you want to benchmark based on fixed KPIs? Surely it would result in nothing more than discussions on why ‘we’ are different from all the others….!

The organisation of the 21st century will be about radical change, social engagement, ecosystems, and knowledge flows

I see two ‘forces’ working in opposite directions: We stick to the arguments about how the value of social is very hard to measure, but at the same time we are reluctant to make decisions due to the lack of objective data. The bigdata trend will help here, but the above ‘conflict’ must be reconciled to get things moving. Right now we are in a position where we know that something needs to be done, but not quite how…